Prep baseball: Tam held to two hits in North Coast Section first-round loss

After being limited to one hit in the MCAL championship game on Saturday night, the Tam High baseball team was no doubt hoping to flex its offensive muscles on Tuesday when the North Coast Section playoffs opened.

But that didn't happen.

Despite getting a combined three-hitter from pitchers Zack Tolpen and Mason Collins, the seventh-seeded Red-tailed Hawks suffered a 2-0 loss to No. 10 Kennedy of Fremont in a Division III game in Mill Valley. Tam (16-11) managed just two hits against Titans pitcher Darren Williams and never got a runner past second base.

"It was a little bit frustrating because our team, all year, we've been pretty good offensively," said Tam senior Chris Hayman, who had one of the Hawks' hits. "We've been hitting the daylights out of the ball and today we came in and ... nothing. It seemed like a lot of the time this year we were hitting the faster pitchers better than the slower pitchers and we just got a little bit off balance today. But give him credit; he did a pretty good job mixing up his curveball and his fastball."

Tam's best scoring chances came in the first two innings. In the first, Kevin Jordan reached on a one-out error and Jonny Wachtel lined a ball into right-center field which was run down by right fielder Mark Wiscombe. In the second, Hayman led off with a single but never advanced past second.

Kennedy (13-12) wasn't showing much offensively, either, with Tolpen holding the Titans hitless through four innings. But that changed in the fifth, when Roman Reed dropped a double onto the right-field line. A sacrifice moved pinch runner Andrew Herrera to third, and a groundout to third allowed him to score.

Kennedy added a second run in the sixth on a bases-loaded squeeze bunt, then rode Williams to the finish line.

"Darren came out and pitched a heck of a game," said Kennedy coach Kevin Lydon, whose team will face Drake in the next round at Albert Park on Saturday night. "That's the first game he's thrown seven innings all year, so that was very much a surprise. I was hoping to get four or five out of him and then go to somebody else but he kept going and kept going and kept going."

"My fastball and my curveball were working," Williams said. "I tried to get in my split-finger a couple times but that wasn't working very well. ... This was the best game I pitched this year. This was probably my best game in a long time."

For Tolpen, the loss was disappointing. But he said the season was not a letdown.

"This was potentially my last baseball game of my career so I was telling myself to just go out there and give it my best," Tolpen said. "But this is all right; it just goes that way. We had a great season, we went to the (MCAL) championship game and then the playoffs. So this was a great experience."